In recent years at Roseville High School, an increasing number of students have been enrolling in AP courses. For the 2015-2016 school year, out of the 1363 students enrolled in AP courses, 862 students attempted at least one AP exam. This increased participation has lead to mixed results – as school administrators feel students are becoming better prepared for college, but AP exam pass rates decline.

The increasing amount of support that both administration and students at RHS are giving the AP program is an important factor that contributes to the increasing participation, according to assistant principal Jason Wilson.

Wilson believes that the AP program is a beneficial catalyst that has the potential to improve students’ success during their high school career and in the future.

“All the research shows that the classes that prepare students the most for college are AP courses, because it’s the skill sets that you learn, and it’s not always necessarily the content,” Wilson said. “I hope every student on our campus would, at some point, challenge themselves with at least one AP course.”

AP Club vice president Delaney Strong believes that encouraging her peers to challenge themselves with AP rigour is having a positive impact on overall enrollment since the club was founded in 2015.

“We have been encouraging students to take AP classes by showing them that while the coursework may be rigorous, there are always people around to help them, whether it be their peers or RHS faculty,” Strong said. “We had a good turnout for our study sessions last year so we as a club do believe we’ve seen an effect.”

But despite the recent increase in enrollment, a multitude of AP courses suffered a decrease in pass rates from the years 2014 to 2015, as well from 2015 to 2016.

AP US HISTORY

In 2015, College Board made changes to the APUSH exam format. The previous framework consisted of 80 multiple choice questions, two Free Response Questions, and one Document Based Question. College Board changed the framework to 55 multiple choice questions, four Short Answer essays, one FRQ, and one DBQ.

When the test changed in 2015, the pass rate for RHS students dropped from a 48 percent to 42 percent. And even after its second year of development, the percentage continued to drop down to a 37 percent pass rate in 2016.

According to APUSH teacher, Jessica Fork, another factor that contributed to the decrease could be the high number of students who attempted the AP exam out of the students enrolled in the yearlong course.

Despite the challenges the teachers may face with the new framework, Fork believes that going from 80 fact based multiple choice questions to 55 stimulus based multiple choice questions is beneficial to the students.

“To know how to help get kids better up and running for a history class in college is still a challenge,” Fork said. “But I think the changes are positive because it’s really how a history class is taught… while we’re still accessing content, it is definitely more focused on skills and were starting to see that pay off.”

This year, between Fork and APUSH teacher Avery Beebe, there are only a total of six sections but they all consist of high numbers of enrollment. Fork hopes to see improvement for this year regarding passing rates as well as overall improvement with tackling the new framework.

“I think if we continue to keep making these modifications, it’ll make it better each time,” Fork said.

AP EUROPEAN HISTORY

The more recent change in multiple choice framework on the APEH exam mirrors that of APUSH, though the shift from 80 fact-based multiple choice questions to 55 stimulus-based multiple choice questions was made a year later, in 2016.

According to APEH teacher Carol Crabtree, both the FRQs and DBQs have a more complicated rubric as well.

Crabtree believes that the sudden decrease in pass rate percentages from 2015 to 2016 is an immediate effect of the changes made to the exam and that the rigour that this updated version brings could easily explain the slight decrease in pass rates from 58 percent to 51 percent.

“I think [the stimulus based questions] are harder: they require that students have a really high level of reading to do well on that section,” Crabtree said. “You can’t just learn the facts and ace the test.”

“I assumed we’d have a drop in scores, simply because it was a revised test and we were teaching it for the very first time,” Crabtree said. “I was happy that even though the percentage who passed did go down just a little bit, our average scores went up.”

Despite the updated exam still being in its infant stages, Crabtree has high hopes for the future of her teaching as well as her students’ success.

“Last year I focused more on having students work with, analyze, and write with primary sources and this year I’m going to increase that even more,” Crabtree said. “I’m a lot more aware of what it takes to get students to get to the point where they can pass the exam.”

Crabtree anticipates that College Board could continue to make changes the format of the APEH exam, but is confident that these changes will not have a detrimental impact on students’ success, especially with the support of other teachers facing the same challenges.

“It is a little frustrating at this point that College Board is still continuing to change their expectations because even small changes could have a pretty big impact on us, but we’ll work through it and incorporate any changes that the College Board makes,” Crabtree said. “The APEH test and the APUSH test are now the same, just with different content, so [Mrs. Fork, Ms. Beebe, and I] are working together to come up with ways to better teach students the skills they need to do well on the tests.”

AP ART HISTORY

When College Board changed the APAH exam in 2016, the course at RHS saw a five percent decline in pass rate percentages, from 64 percent to 59 percent.

In the 2015-2016 school year, APAH teacher, Patricia Leong and her students were not only faced with a new framework of multiple choice questions and essay questions, but also had to absorb more content than in previous years.

According to Leong, the exam went from 100 multiple choice questions to 80, eight essay questions to six, and a concentrated focus on only 250 images for the AP exam.

The curriculum now encompasses a wider focus on art around the world, as opposed to the previous focus solely on Western art.

These drastic changes in both format and content forced Leong to discard almost everything she’s previously taught. This shift has challenged both Leong and the students enrolled in her 2016 class.

“Not only are they learning all the European art like the renaissance and the pop art, they are also learning non-western art like African, Chinese, Oceanic, etc.,” Leong said. “So I had to scrap everything that I usually taught and everything that I’ve learned over the past 12 years to teach a whole new curriculum.”

Although Leong does expect more experience teaching the course to aid in higher pass rates for this year, she values the experience the new curriculum will bring no matter the exam results at the end of the year.

“I do expect [the scores] to go up this year,” Leong said. “We always want the students to be successful on the test but I think just the experience of learning how everything connects globally is more important to this class than it is to have a high pass rate.”

AP ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

APES teacher CJ Addington shared his experiences after his first year teaching in the 2014-15 school year.

The 2016 pass rate percentages went up 4 percent compared to 2015. Addington attributes this to his increasing experience with the curriculum and in-class activities.

“It’s sort of interesting because I had no idea how it was going to work, so I was basically just copying [former APES teacher] Alex Uribe,” Addington said. “But the next time around I started to get a better feel for laying out labs, which labs worked well, and which labs didn’t work so well, and also with timing and pacing.”

Addington is the only APES teacher on campus this year, and with the most sections of APES RHS has ever had, he has hopes to see an increase in attempt rates as well as pass rates but would be satisfied with simply giving students a fun and enriching science experience.

“It’d be nice if it could go higher,” Addington said. “But of course when you have this many people taking the class and you have students who may just be in it for the experience, maybe they want to take it because they are interested, they have friends in the class, or they just want to do the labs, and maybe they aren’t really into the academic part, you have to balance that with the people who are actually going for the five.”

AP COMPUTER SCIENCE A

The 2015-16 school year was the first RHS offered APCSA on campus. In 2014, four RHS students enrolled in the Placer County Office of Education’s ROP AP Computer Science A course, all of whom who attempted the exam. Two of the four passed the exam. For the 2015-16 school year, three RHS students enrolled, and one attempted and passed the exam.

In its first year on campus, the nine students enrolled, more than doubling the amount of RHS students in the ROP course over two years prior.

The percentage of students who attempted the APCSA exam after taking the class decreased from 2014 to 2015 by 17 percent. The class was eventually offered during school hours in 2016, and the attempt rate percentages rose from 33 percent to 88 percent leading to the conclusion that having the class offered this way could be a reason that these statistics increased last year despite the sudden decrease from 2014 to 2015.

This is now the second year of APCSA’s presence during school hours at RHS. APCSA teacher Bradlee Crockett hopes that both the number of students enrolled and students attempting the exam at the end of the year will continue to increase, despite other factors like student’s motives for taking the exam.

“I hope I increase the number of students who are taking it,” Crockett said. “It makes sense to me why some students wouldn’t take it because their colleges wouldn’t accept [the credits] but I do hope to increase the amount of students taking the exam.”

AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

APHG saw an influx of enrollment this school year because of the new policy approved by Roseville Joint Union High School District last spring. This year is the first that APHG was introduced as an option for sophomores as their social science requirement.

APHG teacher Mark Andreatta believes that this opportunity could drive increased enrollment for the class in the future.

“I would say that there’s a good chance we could double the number of classes by next year,” Andreatta said.

This year, there are two APHG sections compared to one section from last year. According to counselor Graciela Fernandez, 27 of the 57 students taking APHG this year are sophomores.